I love to check out the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenges that Randy Seaver sends out way each Saturday Night, and this one looks like a great way to quanitfy what research I need to do next! So tune up the “Mission Impossible” music, check out the challenge, and play along!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it is to: 1) Participate in the Ancestors GeneaMeme created by Jill Ball on the Geniausblog. Thank you to Jill for the SNGF idea! Jill is collecting Ancestors MeGeneaMeme entries too.The rules, and the Meme list, is given below in my response.
Here’s mine: The Rules:

2) Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post, in a Facebook Status post or note, or in a Google+ Stream item.

The list should be annotated in the following manner:

Things you have already done or found: bold face typeThings you would like to do or find: italicize (colour optional)
Things you haven’t done or found and don’t care to: plain type
You are encouraged to add extra comments in brackets after each item

The Meme:

Which of these apply to you?

I dived in to answer the questions after copying them from Randy Seaver’s page, and though I read the above instructions, I chose to put my answers in ( parenthese…) and in the red color you see here.

1. Can name my 16 great-great-grandparents. (I might have to cheat and look at the family tree program for part of these!)

2. Can name over 50 direct ancestors. (Definitely would have to cheat and look at my family tree program!)

3. Have photographs or portraits of my 8 great-grandparents. (I do have photos of all of them, thanks to my mom, and my generous aunts and uncles who have shared their holdings so that I might scan and digitize them.)

4. Have an ancestor who was married more than three times. (I have some who were married three times, but haven’t located any that I know of that were married more than three.)

5. Have an ancestor who was a bigamist. (Not that I know of… Would make the family tree more interesting though, wouldn’t it?)

6. Met all four of my grandparents. (I Couldn’t. Both grandfathers passed away before I was born. I did meet and know both of my grandmothers.)

7. Met one or more of my great-grandparents. (I remember my great-grandfather even though I was about 2 1/2 years old when he passed away.)

8. Named a child after an ancestor. (We did, though not intentionally. My husband’s great-grandfather was named James Kline, and we gave that name as a middle name to our son without knowing that there was an ancestor bearing that as a name.)

9. Bear an ancestor’s given name/s. (Not only do I not bear an ancestor’s name, my grandmother was unhappy with my mom, her daughter, for giving me the name of an alcholic beverage. Unhappy enough that for a time, when I was very, very small, I wondered if the “Carrie” that took an axe to the bars and saloons in Kansas was my grandmother…)

10. Have an ancestor from Great Britain or Ireland. (I have an ancestor from Great Britain, and I probably do from Ireland as well, but have yet to find that link or proof of it. Very difficult with the name Jones!)

11. Have an ancestor from Asia (No.)

12. Have an ancestor from Continental Europe. (Probably. My geography isn’t what it should be….)

13. Have an ancestor from Africa. (No, but my granddaughters do.)

14. Have an ancestor who was an agricultural labourer (in the US and UK) (Yes, most of my ancestors were involved in farming, right up to my own father, and the same on my mother’s side.)

15. Have an ancestor who had large land holdings (what’s large? Larger than 40 acres? Yep. Larger than 640 acres? Probably.) (Yes, by yesterday’s standards my ancestors had large land holdings.)

16. Have an ancestor who was a holy man – minister, priest, rabbi (Jonathan Oatley in Killingly CT in 19th century, several more in 17th century) (We have ministers in my family, and one of my ancestors was “Deacon Samuel Stocking, son of George Stocking. George was born in circa 1582 in Suffolk, England. Deacon Samuel was born in England also and immigrated to America in 1633. They became part of Thomas Hooker’s party, and George was one of Hartford, CT’s founding fathers.)

17. Have an ancestor who was a midwife (unsure) (Not that I know of.)

18. Have an ancestor who was an author (unsure) (Not that I know of.)

19. Have an ancestor with the surname Smith, Murphy or Jones (many Smiths, no Murphys, only one Jones line) One large Smith line, one Jones line that quickly turns into a huge brick wall.

20. Have an ancestor with the surname Wong, Kim, Suzuki or Ng. (No. Not that I know of.)

21. Have an ancestor with a surname beginning with X. (Not that I know of.)

22. Have an ancestor with a forename beginnining with Z (three generations of Zachariah Hildreths, and a Zechariah Barber) (Not that I know of.)
23. Have an ancestor born on 25th December. (Yes, my great-grandfather, Roderick Remine Stocking was born 25 December 1853.)

24. Have an ancestor born on New Year’s Day. (Not that I know of.)

25. Have blue blood in your family lines (supposedly if Royal Descendants book is right) (No. Not that I know of.)

26. Have a parent who was born in a country different from my country of birth. (No.)

27. Have a grandparent who was born in a country different from my country of birth (nope, one great-grandparent born in Canada is the last one born in another country) (No. Two lines came to America in the 1600′s. Need to get other lines back that far.)

28. Can trace a direct family line back to the eighteenth century (all but 3 or 4 of my 32 3rd great-grandparents. (Have several lines back to the 18th century.)

29. Can trace a direct family line back to the seventeenth century or earlier (quite a few) (some, not as many as to the 18th century.)

31. Have ancestors who signed their marriage certificate with an X (not that I know of) (My earliest Stocking ancestor, George Stocking, Hartford, CT founder, signed his will with an X. He was, besides being a farmer, a surveyor, so I wonder if he was just no longer able to sign his name due to advanced age, rather than not being literate.)

32. Have a grandparent or earlier ancestor who went to university (not that I know of) (Yes, both my grandparents on my father’s side, Elmer and Maud (McGinnis) Stocking attended college, though I believe neither graduated with a four year degree. My grandmother received a teaching certificate and taught for a year or two, perhaps a bit longer.)

33. Have an ancestor who was convicted of a criminal offence (several are in Sex in Middlesex book) (Not that I have found yet.)

34. Have an ancestor who was a victim of crime (logic says someone in 12 generations must have been, not sure about this one) (Probably, but I have not found it yet.)

35. Have shared an ancestor’s story online or in a magazine (probably in Genea-Musings…) (I have shared several ancestor’s short stories online on my blog here, and in the small town history book that I co-authored, “Mayfield: Then & Now.)

36. Have published a family history online or in print (two books self=published and shared with family) (I haven’t published a book, just a notebook that I take to family reunions.)

37. Have visited an ancestor’s home from the 19th or earlier centuries (several in New England, and the Ranslow Smith Inn in Wisconsin) (Yes, several here in Kansas, and one ancestor’s home in Kentucky.)

38. Still have an ancestor’s home from the 19th or earlier centuries in the family (not in the family…the Ranslow smith Inn in Wisconsin would qualify if I’d bought it) (My grandfather’s farm was bought by my parent’s and is still owned by my mother. It has been in the family now since 1903. The house burned down several years ago, however.)

39. Have a family bible from the 19th Century (have Bible pages for births, marriages, deaths, but not the Bible) (The only family Bible that I know of is owned by my Uncle and his family.)

The following paragraph is excerpted from the “History of Milan, Kansas, 1879 – 1978″, by Leslie “Bud” Yates. The book is now out of print and the author has passed away, but there is a copy of the book in the Sumner County History and Research Center. The book is small, but is packed with information about the area’s early residents and the town’s businesses.

Of the Eighth Grade Graduates, Mae Kline and Herbert Deffenbaugh are in my husband’s family tree. Mae was his great-aunt, and I’m honestly not sure who Herbert is, but probably an uncle or great uncle. Several of my husband’s aunts and uncles (and his mother) went by their middle names, and sometimes kept their first names a closely guarded secret, so I will have to ask a cousin who is the keeper of the Deffenbaugh Genealogy to find out how he fits into our tree.

Sallie/Sally Bunker, who graduated with them, is the granddaughter of Eng Bunker, one of the famous Siamese (conjoined) twins, Chang and Eng Bunker.

Sally’s father was James Montgomery, son of Eng Bunker. Eng and Chang married sisters and each couple had several children. You can read more about them by following the links below:

Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings issued this challenge on Saturday night! I’m a bit late, but I don’t want to miss out on all the fun, so here goes!

Hey geneaphiles – it’s Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun for all Genea-Musing readers.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end…), is to:

1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome’s post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:

* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?

* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?

* Did your interest stem from your child’s school project on genealogy?

* If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.

2) Write your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook.

Maybe I was always a little interested in family history, but after Hobart Stocking, a professor from Oklahoma researched, wrote, and published the Stocking Ancestry, I became more interested, and shared the information with my husband’s family. And that’s when my father-in-law, Melvin Kline, stated that he wished someone would research their family tree.

And He Kind of Hoped They Wouldn’t, Too…

And, he said, he kind of hoped maybe they wouldn’t, too. He said that he was afraid of “what we might find.”

The story that he had always heard went like this, “three brothers came west, fought along the way, and never corresponded again.”

And because there wasn’t any correspondence between Pop’s family, and his grandfather’s family, at least that he knew of, he believed the story to be true, and he was afraid that we’d find out that his grandfather might have been the the person who caused the problem.

But still, he really wanted to know.

Who could possibly resist a puzzle or a challenge like this?

Not me, for sure, so I took up the quest and along the way became ‘hooked’ on genealogy and preserving family history.

I was woefully ignorant of how to get started, so it was quite a long time before I learned about at least one ‘family feud’, learned where the family had migrated to Kansas from, and ‘met up’ with some distant cousins.

Unfortunately, by that time, my father-in-law had passed on, and I really wish he were here so that I could say “Thank you” to him for starting me on such a fun and addictive hobby/pastime/obsession.

Not everyone has a great-grandmother who lives to be 100, so this is a special photograph, and I’m glad my parents captured the moment on film.

Best Screen Play – I’m not sure that any of my stories would make a great screen play - unless it would be the part of the Christmas Gifts story that involves myself and my two oldest nephews playing Cowboys and Indians in the pasture on our stick horses! Even my patient collie dog Lassie wasn’t safe if we had a lasso!

I’d have to cast John Wayne as my dad. First, I always thought there was a resemblance, and second, my dad had that same kind of confidence that the Duke projected on film.

My mom, well, she might be a cross of Maureen O’Hara and the Beav’s mom, June Cleaver, though she never wore dresses, pearls, and heels everyday, those were church clothes.

Because she worked in the field she was more likely to be in jeans, flannel shirts, and maybe even overalls.

And the casting for my nephews and I, well, lets just say “The Little Rascals” would be the best cast for us…

Best Documentary – My blog post about the Burchfiel Cemetery, the church and the church history connected with it holds a special place in my heart.

Best Biography – This post about my brother, Gary “Sox” Stocking is probably my favorite biography. It doesn’t tell when he was born, nor whom he was born to, but it does capture just a bit of the essence of who he was, what kind of man he was, and you get an idea of why other street rodder friends came from three states in their street rods to honor him one last time.

Best Comedy – The funniest thing that I blogged about in 2009 was when we crazy high school kids used to drag main singing the top hit at the time “Hey There Little Red Riding Hood” at the top of our lungs!

When I was just a little girl, I looked forward each year to my Uncle Frank Stocking’s Christmas card.

It was unique, shaped like a little stocking, with a verse about each member of the family and their travels, triumphs, and sometimes the trials of their life. I still have most of them, stored away.

Sometimes this little Christmas card was my “show and tell” for school, I was that proud of it!

After I married and had children, Uncle Frank’s example became my inspiration. Nearly every Christmas I drew up a little picture (usually of children in old-fashioned sunbonnet and overalls) to depict my two kids doing something representative of our year, and wrote a poem that reflected the years happenings, joys, and sorrows.

2001 was a year of incredible sorrow intermingled with small joys and it is that poem that I’ve chosen to share here:

Kline Christmas Card 2001

I want to be a kid again, it’s Christmas time you see.
I want to hang the tinsel on a lop-sided Christmas tree.
I want to lick the frosting bowl and nibble cookie dough.
I want to call up all my friends and Christmas caroling go.

But most of all I want to wish you Peace and Joy and Love.
And thank our Lord for all His blessings and strength from above.
I hope that kids of every age receive their most-longed-for toy.
And find each day filled with love and the season’s Christmas Joy.

There are days that bring us sunshine, while others bring us rain.
There are years that bring us joy, while others bring us pain.
2001 was such a year of sorrow and sadness in our life.
We pray for comfort and healing from life’s sorrowful strife.

Nancy, my brother Fred’s wife and friend lost her cancer’s fight
In the wee hours of the morning on a January night.
Fifty years of marriage, with five children they were blessed.
Nancy’s smile, her laugh, her faith, her courage, all are sorely missed.

We lost my brother, Gary, on Memorial Day’s afternoon.
He was too young, he was so loved, he died much too soon.
His mom, his wife, his daughter, his brother and “step” sons three,
We each and all miss him so very much you see.

Amidst our grief, we pray for leaders and our troops overseas.
We ask the Lord on bended knee for Peace and safety, Please.
We look forward with hope to the year 2002,
And pray for healing of our hearts and joy that comes anew.

Jarrod’s in K.C., and lucky to be working still at Sprint
We’re thankful that his job was not one of those that ‘went.”
And soon wedding bells will ring in February 2002,
When Marya and Marc tie the knot and happily say “I do.”

Norman hopes each plane he inspects is up to Cessna’s best.
Sometimes he flies with the pilots when they run their tests.
Sherry writes for the Wichita Eagle’s magazine “Active Life”
Web design, “The Mayfield Book”, Sherry has an “active life.”

May this your Merriest Christmas be,
May whatever you wish for be under your tree.
And May God hold you safely in His hand,
As you travel around our beautiful land.

Merry Christmas!
Norman, Sherry, Jarrod & Marya

My Christmas card has changed in several ways. I no longer draw the ‘sunbonnet kids’ as our family has expanded. I now have two adorable granddaughters, and their picture sometimes graces the card’s front.

My oldest granddaughter loves to draw, and I think I will soon be asking her to draw the picture for the front of my card!

Thanks to the inspiration of my niece, I now also include a photo collage with my Christmas cards that I create on my photo software, and so we have a year of our life in word and picture for close family and friends.

Looking back through those cards, it’s easy to see just where we ‘were’ in life, and what was going on each year!

Here, thanks to Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings, is your Saturday Night Genealogy Fun writing mission, if you decide to accept it (cue the Mission: Impossible music…):

1. What is the Nicest Thing another genealogist did for you, or to you, in the last week or so? (If you have no examples for this past week, go back in time – surely someone has done a nice thing for you in recent years!).

2. Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, in a comment on Facebook, or in a tweet on Twitter.

In the past few weeks, two Twitter friends helped me navigate the rocky-for-me road of how to ‘do stuff’ on my WordPress blog!

I tweeted for help…

In late September, I tweeted for help in finding a Blog Roll so I could add other folks blog addresses to my blog!

And GeneaBloggers (@geneabloggers on Twitter) tweeted me the instructions for how to do it, then tweeted me a “why don’t you blog about it message later.” (I still plan to!)

It took @geneabloggers about six tweets at 140 characters to send me the info, but the instructions were perfect.

I found the Blog Roll I wanted, and next thing you know, I had a blog roll on my blog! Woo Hoo! Thanks, GeneaBloggers! Now, I just need to find the time to add everyone’s blog on there.

Yesterday, I followed a link…

Just yesterday, I followed a link on Twitter from @Bonnie67 that led me to her post at Bonnie67′s. (Bonnie isn’t a genealogist, yet, but I’m ‘recruiting’ her.)

When I mentioned that I wished I knew how to post music video’s on my site, Bonnie got busy and wrote a blog post to show me how!

Awesome! Thanks, Bonnie!

And though this was a long time ago and I’d have to dig through a lot of old genealogy to find her name, there was a wonderfully kind woman who was the first woman I wrote to to try to find information about my husband’s Kline family.

This wonderful woman looked up some information in the newspaper, located a description about the farm animals owned, crops grown, and the orchard on the farm, and found information about the two children of James and Elizabeth Klinethat had passed away while they lived there.

I was able to locate some information at the library in Wichita that helped her out some, too, information that told her that some of her family had been founding members in the small cattle town that was Wichita in its early days.

It was the help from this woman, and others like her that helped me have those early successes in piecing together the family histories that weave together and make up the fabric of who our family is, and fueled my desire to learn more, and more.

The Ryan Township Cemetery is located in Sumner County, one mile west of Milan, Kansas on Highway 160, or about 16 miles west of Wellington, Kansas.

John is the fourth son of James and Elizabeth (Conver) Kline. John had three older brothers who passed away before the family moved to Kansas. You can read more about James and Elizabeth Kline’s family here.

Jessie is the daughter of Nathaniel and Mary (McMulin) Wood. Nathaniel and Mary homesteaded a quarter section of land in Sumner County, Kansas, near Milan, and are also buried in the Ryan Township Cemetery, Milan, Kansas.

James and Elizabeth (Conver) Kline are buried in Ryan Township Cemetery, near Milan, Sumner County, Kansas. The cemetery is located one mile west of Milan, Kansas on Highway 160.

James and Elizabeth (Conver) Kline came to Caldwell, Kansas shortly before the 1893 Cherokee Strip Run, where as family story has it, James ran in the Cherokee Strip Run, and when he was not fortunate enough to win free land, he later came to the Milan, Kansas area, where he purchased land along the Chickaskia River south of Milan.

James was born in Clarion County, PA.

Some of the following information includes information that I personally have found, but also includes information that I received from cousin Liz Williams:

Elizabeth Conver was born 4 May 1846 in Richland, Lebanon Co., PA, and was the daughter of of John A. Conver & Marry Huff.

James and Elizabeth were married in Knox, County, Illinois on 31 Oct 1867. They had three sons that died before they came to Kansas, Charles William Kline, born in 1868 but died before 1870, and two more sons, Levi born in 1870 in Illinois and Samuel born in 1872 in Iowa also died young.

After coming to Kansas, they had seven more children. The oldest surviving son, John Conver Kline, was my husband’s grandfather.